Downgrade from VirtualBox 7.1.6 to 7.0.24 on EOS

I hate the VirtualBox 7.1 GUI and I’ve been trying to downgrade to 7.0.24 for quite a while now. I’ve tried a lot of things and they all don’t work for me. I tried using the “all distributions” download on the VirtualBox download page (it brought me to a LONG string of text (some of it garbled) which is supposed to make a run file that I don’t wanna copy down), and converting an rpm file to make in installable on EOS. For that to work, I tried making a PKGBUILD file manually (VirtualBox didn’t open up), and using RPMExtract (VirtualBox Manager 7.0 did open up, but no VMs would start, probably due to the mismatching vboxdrv versions). Please help me out here. I need someone to either give me a solution on how to fix the mismatching vboxdrv versions, or how to get the old VirtualBox UI back. I know this isn’t the best place to post this question, but the VirtualBox forum servers are going up and down and up and down, probably due to DDOS attacks. Note: I also don’t want to use the text based interface.

Welcome to the community @ThatOneWindowsFan :wave::partying_face: :enos_flag:

VirtualBox is likely going to be a tricky one to hold back indefinetely, because it requires kernel integration (virtualbox-host-dkms), so there are wider system compatibilities to take into account.

If VirtualBox is something you intend to use for some time, my recommendation is to familiarise yourself with the new UI.

But all that aside, the process of downgrading under EndeavourOS isn’t difficult, with the caveat that it might break things because it’s forcing your system into a state of “partial update”.

First install VirtualBox the normal way:

sudo pacman -S virtualbox

Then downgrade it to your version of choice:

sudo downgrade virtualbox
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I should also add, you’ll likely as minimum, need to downgrade other VirtualBox dependencies too, such as virtualbox-host-dkms. There may be others too.

This, as has already been pointed out by @Bink, will not fall out well.

The updates on Arch are all or nothing. One could for a short period of time ignore updates of a package but as Arch machinery works as a whole, things will break. And it is not a question if but when.

Also updates may bring changes to the GUI that we don’t like but more importantly they bring bug and security fixes.

Do I want to run on outdated software and miss on bug a and security fixes for cosmetic reasons?

Thanks! Didn’t know I could do that!